by Peter Gatien
Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t consider any of it a hardship. When I was a child, my mother made Saturday night baths into a ritualized expression of her affection. Our house had a floor furnace, and she would toss my pajamas over the heating vent to warm them. I’d come out of the tepid water and she’d towel me down, then slip me into a pair of toasty pj’s that she had sewn herself.
Sundays, in most of our neighborhood households, were devoted to a sacred-secular schedule: church in the morning, family dinner midday, and then, in the evening, TV. The morning and afternoon held little interest for me, but when the dishes had been cleared, we kicked off our family viewing with Walt Disney Presents, which led seamlessly into The Ed Sullivan Show. If I had been a particularly good boy that week—a rare occurrence—I was allowed to stay up and watch Bonanza. It was a wildly entertaining lineup chock-full of Western Civilization ideals like capitalism, consumerism, and a breakneck work ethic.
Those television shows served as my window to the south, and the vision of American domestic bliss they presented became an obsession. The sitcoms—Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and especially Leave It to Beaver—showed an idyllic vision of life. The Beaver came home from school to hot chocolate and loving conversations with his mom and dad. June always had on an impeccable dress, and Ward consistently wore a spotless pressed shirt and straight tie. The parents were kind, never yelled, were always in a good mood, and kept a home where everything had its place, polished and purposeful. The feckless but harmless Eddie Haskell was the closest thing that golden realm apparently had to evil.
That was what wealth looked like to me. Sitcom happiness was American and upper class, two qualities that were inextricably linked in my young mind. I bought into the hype, hard. Those episodes ought to have had warning labels, they were so addictive, seductive, and intoxicating, like cultural cocaine.
Recently, through the wonders of cable TV, I stumbled across a random episode of Beaver where Theodore “the Beaver” Cleaver won a gold necklace at a carnival and wanted to present it to his crush. June and Ward Cleaver painstakingly guided him through the emotionally loaded gifting process.
No wonder we were so hypnotized by a TV show, I thought, watching the paint-by-numbers plot unfold. There was no way I could ever have discussed with my parents anything so fraught and personal as young romance. Maman was too busy keeping our entire house together and corralling five sons, making our clothes, cooking our meals, fixing our car. Papa came home in his postal uniform, ready to kick off his shoes and relax. An exhausted Bernard Gatien was definitely not up for a conversation.
Neither of them had the time or interest to navigate their son’s social anxieties. Not to mention, my parents were fairly strict Catholics and faithfully followed the Church’s teachings and social directives. I wasn’t supposed to have crushes on girls. I was supposed to work hard and, when the time came, marry a neighborhood girl without much courting. The Beaver’s type of schoolboy puppy love wasn’t possible in my universe, though it seemed to be a matter of course in this other, finer universe that I believed existed just across the border but far, far away.
Seeing the Cinderella castle sparkling with Tinkerbell’s pixie dust every Sunday during the opening credits of Walt Disney Presents sent a clear message: if I wished upon a star, there’d be no harm or shame in forever expecting my dreams to come true. The truth was, that Disney castle that floated through our living room every Sunday could have been on the moon for all we knew. I couldn’t imagine even asking: Can we go there, Papa? Can we go to Disneyland? I knew what the answer would be.
Eh, Pierre, are you stupid?
Our type of family vacation was much more subdued. On the rare occasion that we traveled, we didn’t stay in hotels, much less fairy-tale castles. We camped, and the first time we ventured out, to Meacham Lake in the Adirondacks, we nearly froze to death. My parents had little idea what they were doing. Bernard had borrowed an army tent from a buddy, and we hadn’t packed sleeping bags, only bed linens. None of us understood how different the weather would be in the mountains of upstate New York, compared to summery Cornwall. I still have a clear memory of my twin brothers whimpering, weeping through the night as they huddled with my mother.
On later excursions, we went a little better equipped, but we still never rivaled the elaborate setups of the American campers all around us. On those trips, my father met fellow postal workers from the US, and it was obvious to me, even as a child, that they were better off than we were. They possessed deluxe camping gear, had new cars—sometimes two new cars!—and novelties like Polaroid cameras, all the consumerist bells and whistles that my father and his fellow postal clerks in Canada lacked.
As far as I understood, my dad and these American guys did the same job, so their access to luxury baffled and fascinated me. The only way I could explain it was that something magical must be happening just across the Saint Lawrence River, something like ancient alchemy that could turn our leaden lives into gold. All of America had that new-car smell, while my hometown boasted a very different kind of odor.
Our most frequent trips took us farther away from American luxury, to Clarence Creek, Canada. Anytime my mother wanted to visit her aunts, we’d all pile in the car and head out to the original homestead. The conditions there were shockingly primitive. No electricity, no indoor plumbing, with the only luxury being the hand-pump-powered “running water” in the kitchen. For light, they used kerosene lamps. The ripped-apart catalogs stacked conveniently beside the toilet in the outhouse were a detail that set the place apart as a whole different realm.
Grand-Maman Francine couldn’t read, write, or do anything that involved numbers. She didn’t speak any English. But simply by virtue of her buoyant personality, she was one of my favorite people in the world. She had birthed ten kids, eight of whom survived infancy. When I would ask my mother what it had been like growing up with Fred and Francine in Clarence Creek, she shrugged as if to say that everyone had made do. As a child, my mom loved school so much that she never missed a day, tromping miles in winter darkness down unlit roads, exposing my complaints about walking a few blocks as a spoiled child’s whining.
My mother’s parents’ dynamic somewhat mirrored her and Papa’s relationship. Grandpa Fred was so tight-lipped it was like he was being charged by the word, while Francine was open, tolerant, and beyond kind. During the Depression, they moved forty-five miles south from Clarence Creek to Cornwall, seeking the security of the mill economy. Growing up I saw my grandparents almost every Sunday, but each of their kids had gone on to raise such large families that if we all appeared at once it would have cleaned out the larder. We’d stagger our visits, and we only ate together a few times a year, on special holidays.
On those days we would all gather, rough genetic copies of one another. All the women were warm, open, and loving, the men gruff, closed off, and distracted—a contrast that informed the rest of my life. My mother told me how Francine would sit in the back seat of a rattletrap sedan with her brothers up front. Even though she wasn’t a big drinker, and had seen the ravages that alcoholism had inflicted on her native people, she would cheerfully dip into a case of beer that sat beside her, popping bottles open and handing them up front whenever she was asked. As I said, she was a supremely tolerant woman.
When I drove my wife, Alessandra, over that bridge, we’d crossed over Cornwall Island, a part of the sprawling Mohawk reservation that spreads across both sides of the US-Canada border. My mother’s heritage means that I am a quarter native Algonquin—a completely different tribe from the Mohawks, but, given the prejudices of the day, lumped into the same ethnic group.
Ever since the reservations were established, and especially over the last half century, the border around Cornwall ran hot. Disputes, friction, and outright violence between natives and government authorities convulsed Cornwall Island in particular. Native protests over violations of Mohawk sovereignty were answered by government accusations of drug s
muggling, gun running, and cigarette bootlegging. In 2000, the Seaway International Bridge officially became part of Three Nations Crossing—the three nations being Canada, the US, and the Mohawk Nation.
With my background and the way I’ve lived, I can relate to the concept of being from three nations. I don’t self-identify, like they say nowadays, as a native person, but the influence of my grandmother is there. First Nation people were everywhere in my childhood—on the streets of Cornwall and, of course, around Francine’s home turf of Clarence Creek. But, oddly enough, no one in my family ever talked about being “a quarter Indian” or anything like that. Native heritage was something we simply did not mention. It was a secret that hid in plain sight, a quiet form of cultural apartheid. At my public high school, First Nation kids were bused in, it seemed, simply to take positions on the football team. They showed up, kept to themselves in class, played ball, and then went back home without mixing too much with the rest of the student body.
As I saw it, the things I inherited from my grandmother didn’t have to do with being Algonquin; they were qualities that exemplified humanity. Through her, and through my mother, I learned decency. Francine exhibited no thirst for revenge, to my knowledge, over the historical wrongs done to the First Nation people; none for the prejudice she and her husband experienced from French Canadians; in fact, no anger toward any other person. She and her daughter Lilianne had not a mean bone in their bodies. They both loved to host social gatherings in their homes, bringing everyone together and filling the place with laughter, card playing, joking, and drinking.
If there were any mean bones in the Gatien clan, they came from the other side of our family. Papa was a somewhat sullen, practically wordless presence in our house. I didn’t have to be a genealogist to trace the lineage of that vibe. Grand-Papa passed away when Papa was nine months old, so neither he nor I knew him, but Papa’s mother was enough of a presence to make up for the lack of a paternal influence.
Alphonsine Gatien was maybe the least fun person on earth, with absolutely no sense of humor that I ever witnessed. Her principles were hard and fast: You shouldn’t drink, you shouldn’t smoke, you shouldn’t play cards or laugh or be jovial. You might be able to find favor with the Almighty by becoming a priest. Otherwise, it was best to just sit and not do anything at all, apart from getting yourself to mass often and with abject humility in your heart. The single time I ever saw her laugh during my whole childhood was when my twin brothers were tussling, and one of them went down and cracked his head on the corner of a coffee table. It was a really harsh blow, but my grandmother thought the whole business was the most hilarious thing that ever happened.
Her son Bernard did his best to follow the straight and narrow path laid down by his mother, but there was no joy in it. Like a lot of men of his generation, Papa was molded by the Great Depression, a time when securing enough food, clothing, and adequate shelter required a constant grind. Bernard Gatien and every other adult male I knew growing up was tightfisted with money, not because they were miserly but because they knew what it was like to go without. Anyone who had endured the economic distress of the 1930s and then the hardships of WWII came out of those experiences tough as nails.
Bernard took on his duty as head of the household as though it were a life sentence, and, in his case, it was. There’s a picture that Maman saved with each parent holding one of the twins. The expression on my dad’s face is priceless, so clearly that of a set-upon man just barely keeping panic at bay, facing the firing squad. No to the blindfold, yes to the cigarette.
My mother, when pregnant with the twins, had been hoping for a girl to balance out our family, but Mark and Paul came along instead. Our tiny house on Vimy Avenue grew more crowded, and the wait for the bathroom got longer. Those were the days before disposable diapers, so I was often treated to the spectacle of a toilet full of cloth nappies waiting to be cleaned out.
“Ma!” I’d call out, needing to pee but blocked from going. “What am I supposed to do here?”
The yin and yang qualities of my parents often confounded me. Papa wasn’t domestic, to say the least. It seemed impossible for him to express empathy. He wasn’t a slob or prone to violence, but he had all the charm of a stone statue. My mom constantly filled the house with light, a lot of which was absorbed by the black hole that was my father.
“Why would you marry someone like that?” I asked my mom once, probably after some less-than-happy encounter with my esteemed progenitor.
“Listen,” Maman said. “Dad doesn’t drink, he doesn’t beat me, and he gets a solid paycheck every week. You have no idea—a lot of women, including some of your aunts, their men go to the bar and cash their paychecks, and after they get done with their night of drinking there’s not much left over.”
She was right—at least Papa wasn’t one of those guys. He always kept ten dollars a week for himself, bought a Jos Louis snack cake because he was a lunchbox kind of guy, and provided gas and maintenance for the car. The rest of his weekly pay, which amounted to about fifty or sixty bucks, always went to my mother. Out of that, she had to pay all the bills—everything from the mortgage to the insurance—and provide the whole family with groceries, clothes, and whatever other necessities arose.
Frugality was my father’s most pronounced characteristic. He never willingly parted with money; it always had to be torn out of his closed fists. Our car muffler rusted out almost every winter. Even though I could hear my father coming from blocks away, the muffler half hanging off our car, he wouldn’t repair it. It was embarrassing when the old beater banged and belched up to our house, the whole neighborhood taking notice.
Cars were the supreme marker of prestige in economically depressed Cornwall. There was a whole hierarchy. Driving a Buick, for example, automatically meant you were a step above the average wage earner, especially if your ride was a recent model. Witnessing what was out on the roads was like having a personal Forbes magazine wealth listing for my tiny little world. My parents never once purchased a new car, and the majority of the people in town drove rust buckets.
Gawking through automobile showroom windows at the sleek, hot-off-the-assembly-line models, we yearned for car-culture luxury. I religiously tracked the television ads during Bonanza, the ones that introduced the upcoming new model lines for Buick, Ford, and Dodge. I remember the moment when I first saw the flip-up headlights on the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray. As a ten-year-old, I knew cars like a seasoned auto mechanic and could tell the difference between a Ford Custom and a Ford Galaxy, say, and distinguish them each by year.
My father’s uncle lived in the nearby town of Massena, in that better world across the US border. As kids, we loved to watch him drive up to our house in his brand-new 1957 Lincoln Continental. My brothers and I would rush out to marvel at the big land boat and sit on its hood, desperately hoping the neighbors would notice us. Having a Lincoln out front, we thought, meant we knew a rich person, that our world stretched beyond the limited circumstances of our parents. It gave me status among the neighborhood kids. All I had to do was mention my great-uncle’s Lincoln Continental for an automatic boost in prestige.
I can still remember every single Gatien vehicle of my childhood, from the used 1936 DeSoto to the ’67 green Pontiac with a black vinyl roof, a nice-looking car, even though we had to have been its second or third owners. Cars were one of the most important lenses through which I saw the world. Somewhere inside I ached for something better, finer, higher than what we had, to step out of our tiny home with too many boys and dirty nappies, and into a world like that of the lucky American family the Cleavers.
I was just three years old when I hopped onto my own vehicle, a secondhand tricycle, and ran away from home as fast as I could pedal.
“Forget this crap,” I said to my barely-out-of-diapers self. “I’m not putting up with it anymore.” Of course I don’t recall what sent me running—a scolding from Maman? Maybe a lack of attention because the newborn twins took all her time?—
but I do remember winding up at the local police station, where the gendarmes presented me with my very own can of 7UP. Somehow I’d found my way to an amazing prize, one that I had never possessed before. It was such an astounding piece of luck that, after my mother picked me up and brought me home, I ran away again the next day. My mother, in all her wisdom, figured out what was going on and caught up to me before I could grab my second free serving of bubbly bliss.
In my working-class world on Vimy Avenue, the neighborhood focused on the necessities of shelter, food, and clothing. Anything else was considered an extravagance. All purchases were agonized over, and when my parents finally did have to buy something, they sent the clear message to us kids that a new purchase was a bad thing, not a good thing, and none of us should be happy about it.
If I asked my father for a dime to go buy a comic book, some candy, or almost anything, for that matter, he had a stock reply, always delivered in a terse, grumpy tone.
“Je ne suis pas la banque à Jos Violon!” What do you take me for, the bank of Jos Violon?
The first time Dad dropped the name Jos Violon, my brother Ray and I exchanged a wordless look. I arched my eyebrows. Ray shrugged. Most French Canadian grown-ups used the line, but we kids never knew who the hell this Violon fellow was, only that he must have been very rich, since he evidently owned a bank. Years later I learned that Violon was a fabled French storyteller in the tales of Canadian author Louis-Honoré Fréchette. But to me, he was just one more reason why it wasn’t worth asking for anything I wanted.
The most notable exception to that rule was Christmas, a time of pure, unbounded joy. For months before the actual holiday, my brothers and I pored over store catalogs, especially Eaton’s and Simpson’s, whose glossy full-color wish books were like our very own consumerist porn. I remember getting blown away at age seven when I opened my present and found a little $7.95 tool kit. I had seen it in the store catalog, so I knew exactly how much it cost. And that was that—we each got only a single, glorious present. And I was happy as shit. Every kid I knew looked forward to Christmas.